Being Responsive as a senior?
Have you ever been in an environment where you find the bottleneck is being responsive or the availability of seniors?
There’s a decision needed and you just can’t get hold of him or her to make the call. You’ve prepared your pitch or presentation with all the information they need to give you the right answer but you just can’t get time with them.
Pick another scenario where you’ve asked for an hour, you get given 30 mins and just as fast as you can you rattle through only to get to the end and be told they can’t make the decision as they didn’t get through all they needed! Gaaahhhh!
So it’s a failure of sorts but not necessarily one of our making, still frustrating when it happens. We’re going to look at ideas that we can give to our time-starved execs or managers to help identify the problems and offer up options to overcome them.
In this scenario we’re assuming the executive who is time starved is also operating under a backlog of decisions and demand that is gradually (but persistently) growing as the lack of time is strangling their ability to tackle items in a timely manner.
Problem: Senior management are unable to be responsive
Options:
1. Task their Executive/Personal Assistant to call each [direct report | work stream | project] ‘Lead’ to ask ‘What do you need from Senior Management this week?’ and collate a bullet list of the items and prioritise it for them. (A build on this is for the EA to ask what do you need ‘NEXT’ week instead of this week…) then respond asynchronously to the lead with the update/feedback/decision from the senior.
2. Hold a ‘morning prayers’ call with the direct reports to run around each and ask the same question to download from them same time same place style – and then the senior can respond asynchronously and task his or her EA to find time for any more challenging issues to resolve with that lead individually.
3. Have No Meetings days – take time each week where a strict no-meetings rule applies and work jointly with a direct report (to help the senior to focus and avoid drift) to tackle only the priority items during this time with the aim of resolving 3 backlog items as a minimum.
A second constraint we might be struggling with seniors over is where they are simply overwhelmed by the demand upon them. This could be that they are victims of their own success and too popular for decision-making, more likely there are delegation challenges that they’ve just not addressed.
Problem: Senior Management are overwhelmed and becoming a bottleneck
Options:
1. The senior can define a ‘Delegated Authority’ list which provides greater empowerment and autonomy to direct reports and leads for decisions on their work streams | projects | programmes.
2. Deputise ‘delivery’ decision making to a direct report for a [day | week | select decisions] at a time – giving a great development opportunity to direct report and a ‘test of the system’ for decision-making across his / her management structure.
3. Task his or her EA to maintain a ‘decision bottle neck’ list with the number of days each decision request has been outstanding to aid in prioritising which to proceed with.
4. Task his or her EA to work with a direct report to T-shirt size decisions on the Bottle-neck list and suggest alternative routes for resolution where possible. (A development opportunity for the direct report and for the EA).
5. Enforce strict self-discipline for dedicated decision/bottleneck meetings to work through the backlog and reduce the snowball of demands.
6. Enforce Senior Management Team (SMT) time to focus on the prioritised backlog and ask the direct reports to field some issues | decisions | problems forming a task force from their own teams to work to resolve items.
Feel free to add to this list with your own problems or options to improve things, we can all use more options to get things done.
